Scorpius Port

Text – Blender 2.61

Adding text is a simple process in Blender. The header for this website, shown below, was created in part using Blender text.

The first time you create text in Blender 2.61 you should start with a new document and delete the default cube.

First you need to select ADD > TEXT from the header menu. Look to the top of the program and you will see:

File Add Render Help

Click on ADD and in the dropdown menu select “Text”.

You will now see a selected line of writing that says “Text”, if not, try pressing 7 on the number pad to view the scene from above.

Press TAB to enter edit mode and the text turns grey with a white cursor at the end of it. You can now backspace and type anything you want to write and it will show up. (Note, at any time until you convert the text to a mesh, shown later, you can change what your text says.)

Try writing something else now, then continue.

Got your text? Okay, now, tap TAB again to go back into object mode so you can see the next few changes.

In the PROPERTIES menu, usually on the right side of the screen in Blender’s default setup). you will see a series of little icon tabs that start with a little camera. The seventh one should be a little F. With your writing highlighted in yellow, click on that little F in the properties menu to work on the Font.

The first thing we want to do is adjust the Extrusion. This is a modification slider in the Geometry submenu.

You should see something like the image to the right.

Adjust “Extru 0.000” a bit, say set the number to 0.05? and see what that does. You can then adjust it to your preferred setting for the effect you want.

Also play a bit with the Depth setting under Bevel beside the modification settings.

This would seem like enough for most beginners, but we really want to play around with this text, so we are going to do a few more things before we call it finished.

First we want to change the font. This is nice for learning to adjust things, but it would be even nicer to have a fancy font effect to play with. Right?

On the Properties bar, you can see a series of FONT selections with Regular, Bold, Italic, Bold & Italic…

Locate the “Regular” font there and click on the folder icon to open your file selector. Navigate to your Fonts folder: typically C:\windows\Fonts on a Windows PC.

So, what is possible? I have not yet found a font that Blender could not interpret into a 3 dimensional image for me. Check out a few random samples, including a Wingdings font sample…

For the rest of this demo I will use French Script.

From here you can adjust the color on your script by clicking on the next tab after the F tab on the properties toolset. This shows you the materials tools. The easiest way to adjust the color is to select the white bar in “Diffuse” and adjust the color of it in the popup selector.

The text as it is now, rendered in Blender…

Drumroll please….

There are clearly a lot of small tweaks that can be done to make the text more streamlined, but those will wait for the next part of this demo to be wrote. For now, this should give you a good start in learning about the basics of creating 3D text in Blender 2.61.